The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for making a graphic product on sheet material. More particularly, the invention relates to the making of product with enhanced graphic features through a combination of printing and cutting operations, and the equipment and the processes utilized in making of the product. The equipment and processes have many uses such as making signs, graphic designs, characters and other products with graphic images, and may be used in the field of printing for the production of visual images from data bases.
Within the signmaking field, the generation of graphic designs from a stored program is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,467,525 entitled AUTOMATED SIGN GENERATOR and U.S. Pat. No. 4,799,172 entitled APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATIC LAYOUT OF A SIGN TEXT. The apparatus utilizes a cutting tool that is guided in accordance with a predetermined program to cut alphanumeric characters and other graphic images from a sheet of vinyl material that is releasably secured by a pressure-sensitive adhesive to a carrier or liner. The apparatus is controlled by a microprocessor and includes a keyboard and fonts stored in a memory to prepare sign text. Once the text has been prepared, the apparatus cuts the alphanumeric characters or other graphic designs from the vinyl and the sign text or character is stripped away from the carrier as a whole and transferred to a sign board.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,834,276 discloses a web loading and feeding system in a signmaking apparatus such as described above. The novel feeding system described is utilized to accurately position a web of vinyl material as it is loaded into a signmaking apparatus and to feed the web during the generation of the graphic images comprising the sign.
To achieve a multicolored sign or to produce three dimensional effects with the apparatus disclosed, it is necessary to cut multiple images in different colored materials and then manually overlay the graphic images cut from the colored materials. Alternatively a multi-ply layup of sign material in which different plies have different colors can be formed and cut with similar effects as more particularly described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,512,839.
In the field of printing, it is well known to produce single or multi-color images from stored data bases. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,618,870 discloses thermal transfer-type printer in which a plurality of colors of thermally fusible ink are transferred to a printing medium so as to produce halftone and color images. Another thermal printer for producing multi-color images is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,994,822 which utilizes a foil or web of transfer dyes in multiple colors and contains a thermal print head which is excited with pulses of different widths to control the continuous tone color in an image. U.S. Pat. No. 4,899,170 reveals still another technique for exciting the thermal print head. A related U.S. Pat. No. 4,804,975 discloses the details of a transfer dye used in a thermal printer.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,496,955 discloses another thermal printing apparatus for printing color images on a print medium by means of a thermally transferable material carried on an intermediate web. The web is provided with successive frames of respectively different colors of the thermally transferable material, and index marks along the edge of the web indicate the boundaries between adjacent color frames. A number of passes of the print medium mounted on a rotatable platen, each pass being carried out with a different colored frame of the web, permits the printing of images in the respective colors on the web. In one embodiment the web of thermally transferrable material is contained within a cassette which is received within the housing of the apparatus.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,110,228 illustrates in detail a cassette that may be used in a thermal printer for supporting a web of the thermal transfer film. The illustrated cassette has reels or spindles on which the film is wound, and a rotation prevention mechanism to prevent the film from coming loose when the cassette is removed from a thermal printer.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,815,869 is also related to the printing field, and discloses a method for printing multicolor images from computer stored information by means of a dot matrix printer.
The demand for signs and other sheet material products with multicolored or enhanced graphic images is enormous. While multicolor printing is well known in the art and producing multicolored or enhanced signs by cutting graphic images in sheet material is also well known, a merger of these arts has not been previously employed to produce enhanced graphic images. Furthermore, the convenience, flexibility and speed of producing signs and other graphic images from computer data bases offers significant advantages and substantial opportunity for improvement.
It is accordingly a general object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for making signs, characters, designs and other graphic products that are enhanced through color, halftone and other printed features.